So far this year, the eighth reporter died in Mexico.

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Journalist Armando Linares (Armando Linares) was shot and killed on Tuesday in a city in western Mexico, becoming the eighth journalist to die in a year considered the most violent in the Mexican media for decades.

Linares, director of the monitor Michoacán news portal, was shot in the city of Chitacuaro, in the state of Michoacán. The reporter's death was confirmed to the PA by a spokesman for the Michoacan Public Prosecutor, who said that the agency had already started the corresponding investigation.

Linares died less than two months after the murder of Roberto Toledo, a Michoacan monitor worker who was shot in Zitaquaro on January 31. At that time, Linares said that he received several death threats to the AP and received protection from the police after entering the federal protection mechanism.

Earlier this month, a gunman killed Juan Carlos Muniz, a police intelligence reporter for the Witness Minero news portal in the state of Zacatecas.

Muñiz's murder occurred a few days after Jorge Camero, head of the news portal, died in a shootout, and until a few days before his death, he was the personal secretary of the mayor of the state of Sonora, on the border with the United States. In February, the murder of Heber López, head of the web news portal, was also recorded in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Toledo, a cameraman and video editor for Monitor Michoacán, was shot while preparing for the interview. A few days ago, on January 23, journalist Lourdes Maldonado Lopez died in a car in the border city of Tijuana. Photographer Margarito Martinez was shot a week ago. Journalist José Luis Gamboa died on January 10 in the state of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken expressed concern over the February killing of a journalist in Mexico, claiming that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had not been informed by senior officials. López Obrador seemed to be commenting critically about Mexico's efforts to investigate these crimes and protect journalists.

According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, an activist media protection agency based in New York, Mexico is the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere when it comes to journalistic practice. According to their data, 9 journalists died across the country in 2021.

The difficulty in clarifying the murder of journalists and activists is a serious problem in Mexico, as Alejandro Encinas, deputy minister of Human Rights, Population and Migration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, admitted in December, who admitted that the punishment in these cases exceeds 90%.